Connie’s Courage

by Groves, Annie

  His finger touched her face and Connie froze.

  ‘C is for coward,’ he whispered in her ear, ‘and C is for Connie as well …’

  She could hear him laughing as he pushed her down onto the bed, whilst she tried to break free, kicking out wildly at him.

  ‘Bitch!’ he told her roughly, hitting her again.

  It was like being back in Back Court all over again, abandoned by Kieron and left at the mercy of his uncle, only this time it was worse. Much worse.

  Bill Connolly had only threatened to let others rape her.

  Connie tried to scream through the sickening dizziness of her pain, turning her head frantically from side to side, as the Captain forced open her mouth and thrust a wad of fabric into it. Terrified and hardly able to breathe, she felt him push up her skirts and then straddle her, pinning her beneath him with his weight.

  She tried her best to resist him, pushing at him with her hands, but he simply laughed at her resistance, hitting her so hard that her teeth rattled.

  ‘See, this is what you are going to get, he boasted to her.

  Her eyes had adjusted to the faint light in the room now. Helplessly Connie closed her eyes against the sight of the dark red, pulsing male organ with its thick raised veins.

  ‘I’ve been dreaming about this … do you know that? Dreaming about punishing you for daring to interfere with my plans … my pleasure …

  He was forcing open her legs. Connie kicked out at him and then almost fainted as he grabbed her ankle and twisted it until she thought it was going to break.

  She heard him grunt in satisfaction as her body went limp and then he was thrusting into her; hurting her; forcing her; defiling her.

  He was breathing heavily and hard, thrusting hard, grunting, lost in his own obscene pleasure, Connie recognised, as she lay sickly beneath him barely conscious.

  ‘Whore. Whore … whore …’ He gave one final triumphant thrust, his weight pressing her into the mattress, as he relieved his lust, and then he was pulling away from her, and calmly dressing himself.

  ‘I always get what I want, Sister – one way or another, he told her tauntingly.

  Connie heard the door open, and his voice sharp with loathing, as he demanded, ‘Get out of my way, imbecile! followed by Jinx’s scream of pain, but it still took her several seconds to realise that he had actually gone.

  She felt weak and sick, and her hands were shaking so much it took her what felt like a lifetime to remove the gag from her mouth and then straighten her clothes. Her face felt swollen and she could taste blood on her lip.

  When she opened the door, to her relief the corridor outside was empty apart from Jinx, who was huddled on the floor, his face badly bruised.

  Later Connie had no memory at all of how she got back to her own room or who might have seen her. A quick look in her mirror confirmed everything she had feared. Her face was swollen almost out of recognition and by tomorrow would be black and blue. No amount of bathing it with cold water or applying arnica to it was going to make any difference.

  As for the rest. She simply wasn’t going to allow herself to think about it. Far better to pretend it had never happened. Shudders were wracking her body but she ignored them. It had never happened. Nothing had happened. The Captain had gone and she was safe.

  So why was she crying?

  In the bathroom she scrubbed her skin as though she wanted to scrub it off, leaving it red raw.

  She told everyone who asked that her bruised face and body were the result of a fall outside on the ice, and that was what she told herself she had to believe as well.

  At Christmas, she thought she had succeeded.

  By February, she knew she had not and never could. She had missed her monthlies – twice – and not just that. She was wretchedly, heavingly sick on rising, and had come close to fainting in the operating theatre.

  Thoughts of intense rage and bitterness filled her. She tried every old wives remedy she knew to dislodge the hated life growing inside her, including drinking a bottle of gin before immersing herself in a bath of water so hot it scalded her skin – but to no avail.

  There were other methods, crude and rarely successful, which were too horrific to try. She had seen young women on the wards who had attempted them dying in agony from septicaemia – even wealthy young women sometimes, who had thought themselves safe in the hands of the doctor who had operated illegally on them.

  Instead she clung to the hope that she would miscarry naturally, and that life wouldn’t be so cruel as to make her endure a fate she surely did not deserve.

  But then they were in March, and she was over three months gone. Soon she would start to show. She would lose her job; she would lose everything and be right back where Kieron had left her. Her hope had gone, and in its place all she had was mindless dread and fearful panic.

  She couldn’t endure what lay ahead of her. It was too much for her to bear. Connie had never felt more wretched.

  ‘'Ere look there’s a photo of the Captain and his new Missus in the paper.’

  Connie fought back her nausea as the newspaper was passed up and down the ward whilst everyone looked at the photograph.

  Would the Captain treat his new bride as he had done her? Bitterness filled her. What had she done to deserve such a fate? Surely she had already paid for her youthful mistake?

  She had nothing left to live for now. Nothing! She had lost the man she loved, and now she was going to lose what had been left. Her respectability; her job; her home. She would be destitute and out on the street, pregnant with a child she already hated.

  She had virtually stopped eating, unable to keep food down through a mixture of nausea and sick distress. As a result she was weak and constantly light-headed, gripped by spells of dizziness and stomach-churning despair, which she battled to hide from everybody else.

  As soon as she was off duty, Connie left the ward and crossed the hospital’s busy entrance hall, heading not for the exit to the nurses’ home but instead for the main doors. Wild thoughts of taking her own life filled her head, even though she knew it would be a dreadful sin. The sour taste of her own nausea made her retch and grip her stomach, too caught up in her own despairing thoughts to be aware of anything or anyone else.

  In such cold, icy conditions a person could surely slip easily and unnoticed into the cold waters of the Mersey. It would be over quickly if she didn’t struggle, the water filling her lungs, and drowning out the unwanted life within her along with her own.

  She would be safe then. Why she might even see Harry again! But of course Harry would go to heaven and she would not. People who broke God’s law and took their own lives went straight to hell, everyone knew that! That’s why they were not allowed to be buried in consecrated ground.

  Numbly she started to cross the road, lost in her own dark painful thoughts. She was oblivious to everything bar her own despair, including the car bearing down on her. The driver tried to avoid her, but the road was icy.

  Connie heard the screech of brakes and realised, too late, her danger. Her eyes widened as she saw the car coming toward her. She was going to be killed! In a split second she recognised that she did not, after all, want to die.

  Panic filled her as she tried to turn and run, but it was too late.

  A bystander witnessing the accident cried out in horrified shock. The car skidded to a stop whilst a crowd gathered anxiously round Connie’s prone, still body.

  A tall, striking-looking woman emerged from the back of the car and pushed her way through the crowd commanding sharply, ‘Make way, please, I’m a doctor.’

  ‘A doctor! And her a woman, too! Catch me letting her doctor me,’ one of the onlookers commented in disapproval, as the tall woman knelt down in the road beside Connie. She frowned as she saw the blood trickling stickily from Connie’s mouth. Then suddenly she tensed, as she looked closer and into Connie’s face …

  PART THREE

  NINETEEN

  As the car turned int
o the familiar square, Connie closed her eyes as tightly shut as she could. She had fought so hard against coming here, but in the end she had had to give in. Where else, after all, was there for her to go now that she was well enough to leave hospital?

  Everyone kept telling her how lucky she had been to have suffered nothing more than a nasty bump on the head and a few sprains. And she supposed she ought to be grateful to Iris for her quick-wittedness in inventing Connie’s fictional widowed status for her the moment it became obvious that she was pregnant.

  And since she herself had still been unconscious at the time, Connie had not been in a position to reject the timely invention, learning of it only when one of her fellow nurses had come to see how she was, and told her breathlessly, ‘My, but you are a dark horse, married and widowed, and in the family way and saying nothing of any of it to us!’

  Now of course, it was impossible for her to remain at the Infirmary even if she had been well enough to do so.

  But to have to come here!

  She flinched as Iris drove past the house that belonged to her Aunt Amelia Gibson, refusing to glance toward it.

  The house was ahead of them, elegant and immaculately kept. The gravelled carriageway crunched beneath the tyres of Iris’s car, the same tyres beneath which Connie herself had so nearly met her death.

  Despite her determination not to do so, Connie started to shake. Although she had not said so to anyone, she still experienced flashbacks to that moment when she had thought she must die. In those last, dark seconds before she had collapsed, she had thought instinctively of Harry, and even believed she had felt his presence.

  But when she recovered consciousness she had been not in hell or heaven, but far more prosaically in a hospital bed, with Mr Clegg and Iris standing over her.

  Iris, it appeared, had just been given the role of acting as a medical go-between by the Government, to direct injured soldiers to the hospitals in the area best able to deal with their injuries. Iris had been on her way to see Mr Clegg at the time of Connie’s accident.

  It had been a few days later that she had briskly explained to Mr Clegg, who had been examining Connie’s injuries, that she suspected that it was Connie’s grief at the loss of her husband that had caused her to lose concentration and step out into the road as she had.

  The front door to the house was opening, Connie started to tremble again as she saw the familiar figure standing there.

  ‘Let’s get you out of the car, Connie, and then it’s straight to bed with you,’ Iris was telling her firmly, but Connie couldn’t respond to her. All her attention was concentrated on the woman hurrying toward them.

  The car door opened. Connie bit her lip as a soft hand touched her own, and an even softer voice said emotionally, ‘Oh, Connie, Connie, it is you … Oh dearest, I hardly dared to let myself hope, even though Iris assured me that it was true and that it was you! Gideon, it is Connie. Come quickly and see. Oh, my dearest love … My dearest, dearest sister!’

  Connie could feel Ellie’s tears on her skin as her sister lovingly helped her from the car.

  ‘I didn’t want to come here,’ she began, but immediately Ellie stopped her.

  ‘Not come? But Connie, where else should you go? We are your family! This is your home!’

  ‘No, it is your home, Ellie,’ Connie started to say, but her emotions were clogging her throat and making it impossible for her to speak.

  Iris had told her that Ellie was overjoyed to hear that she was still alive after believing her to have perished in the Titanic, but Connie had not truly dared to believe that her sister would welcome her.

  ‘If only we’d known where you were, and that you were alive.’ Ellie was weeping as Gideon took over from his wife, lifting Connie’s frail form into his arms, to carry her inside.

  ‘Please don t. I can walk, Connie protested, but it was too late, Gideon was carrying her into the house and up the stairs. He took her through a doorway and into the prettiest bedroom Connie had ever seen.

  Tears blurred her vision, but through them she could still see her sister’s anxious face and tear-wet eyes, as she instructed her husband to place Connie on the waiting chaise.

  ‘See, Connie, from here you can look out into the square, and later on, when you are able, we can walk to the park together. Oh, Connie, why have you not written or telephoned?

  ‘Now Ellie, we agreed that there should be no questions, Gideon broke in with quiet authority. ‘At least until Connie is feeling stronger.’

  Iris had come upstairs, and Connie heard her saying firmly that Connie would be better in bed so that she could recover from the journey. Within minutes of those firm words, Connie was tucked up in bed being given a drink of hot milk.

  She was tired, more so than she herself had been prepared for, but her anguish at being forced on her sister’s charity kept her awake. Once she was alone and there was no one to witness her misery and guilt, she plucked worriedly at the bedclothes.

  Ellie couldn’t possibly want her here, surely? Despite the warmth of the room she shivered. She had no right to be here. She didn’t deserve to be here.

  She closed her eyes trying to squeeze back her unwanted tears, as exhaustion, and then sleep, claimed her.

  She was still asleep several hours later, when the door opened gently and Ellie tiptoed in. She stood by the bed and looked emotionally into her sister’s sleeping face.

  In her sleep Connie was aware of the gentle, loving hand touching her face. Without opening her eyes she whispered longingly, ‘Mother.’

  It was the hot splash of Ellie’s tears on her hand that brought her to confused wakefulness.

  ‘Oh, Connie …’

  As Ellie took her in her arms and held her tightly, she could feel her sister’s body shake with the pent-up force of her tears.

  Suddenly she too was crying, clinging to Ellie as Ellie was clinging to her, their tears mingling, just as though they were still young girls.

  ‘Connie, what on earth are you doing out of bed? You know Iris said you must rest, for your own sake, and for the baby’s.’

  ‘Ellie, I’m fine,’ Connie assured her elder sister, as she stood in front of the window of the elegant guest room in Ellie and Gideon’s Winckley Square home.

  ‘Connie, you may think that you are, but dearest, you must try to remember that it is only just a month since Iris brought you here. And if I seem to fuss over you, it is just because I am so happy to have you restored to us! When Iris telephoned from our cousin Cecily’s to tell us that you had not, as we had thought, been on Titanic and that you were alive, I could scarcely take it all in. For such a coincidence to happen! That Iris should have been on her way to the Infirmary for a meeting just as you stepped out into the road.

  ‘I didn’t want Iris to involve Cecily in any of this! I know that Cecily’s husband is her brother, but I can never forget that Cecily’s mother is our aunt – and it certainly wasn’t by my choice that Iris wished me on you, Ellie!

  ‘Cecily means well and is very kind-hearted, Connie. And as for you being wished on me, no such thing! Where else should you go? My dearest wish has been that I might see you again.

  ‘Iris says it is a wonder that her driver was able to stop! I can’t bear to think about how easily I might have lost you! How easily you might have been killed. Ellie gave a small shudder.

  ‘You thought I was dead already,’ Connie couldn’t stop herself from pointing out prosaically.

  ‘Which makes me all the more determined that you shall be properly looked after now that you have been restored to us,’ Ellie returned promptly. ‘Your return to us is like a miracle, Connie. I had grieved for you so much; wished so much that I might tell you how much I love you. Fate meant you to come back to us, Connie, otherwise why should it have been Iris who saw you and recognised you?’

  Connie wondered what her sister would say if she told her that part of her still wished herself dead, despite the luxury and spoiling Ellie was surrounding her with. />
  ‘And it is not just a gift of your return I have been blessed with, Connie, but the hope of a new niece or nephew as well,’ Ellie continued sentimentally.

  Immediately Connie looked down at her left hand and the rings she was wearing on her wedding finger, a plain gold band and a small diamond engagement ring.

  Ellie followed her gaze and blushed prettily.

  ‘We thought it best that you had them. You know how people talk, Connie, and with Aunt Gibson living so close. I know you were working as a nurse, but Iris says it is not uncommon for nurses to marry in secret before their sweethearts go off to war.’

  Sweetheart! An icy coldness had started to invade Connie; nausea rushed into her as she compared the brutal reality of what she had endured with the idyllic image conjured up by her sister’s words.

  ‘You have not spoken of … of anyone, Ellie continued uncertainly, ‘and … and Iris said that you must be allowed to get your strength back before anyone bothered you with questions that might cause you pain. So many brave men have been lost in this War. I can only imagine how I would feel if I were to lose my darling Gideon! Gideon’s right hand had been crippled in a horrific accident before he and Ellie were married. To Ellie’s relief, this meant he had been rejected for military service.

  Ellie couldn’t have made it plainer what she was wanting her to say, Connie recognised, and a part of her was tempted to lie and claim the respectability of marriage, and the widowhood to which she was not entitled.

  But another part of her wanted her sister to know the truth; wanted her to know what had happened to her. Wanted what? To see Ellie recoil from her in shock and horror, because that was what she would do, Connie warned herself. The elegant, protected, respectable wife Ellie had now become, would never be able to understand the kind of situation she, Connie, had been in. Nor the situation she now was in.

  What was the matter with her? Connie asked herself in irritation. Why was she reverting to such childishness, especially when Ellie had been so kind and welcoming to her? Was it because her sister’s use of the word ‘sweetheart had conjured up for Connie images of Harry?